Badger Sport drops China factory over reported forced Uighur labor

Badger Sport drops China factory over reported forced Uighur labor

An American company severed its ties to a Chinese manufacturer that was reportedly making clothes using forced labor from an oppressed ethnic minority.

Badger Sport, a North Carolina firm that makes custom sportswear for institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and Texas A&M, ditched the supplier Hetian Taida Apparel this week.

Hetian Taida is a privately-owned company located inside an internment camp in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, the epicenter of China’s well-documented oppression of the Uighur minority.

Xinjiang is home to some 11 million Uighurs, a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority currently subjected to unprecedented and invasive surveillance techniques by the Chinese state. The region is also known as East Turkestan.

The entrance of the “Hotan City apparel employment training base,” where Hetian Taida has a factory, in Xinjiang, pictured in December 2018. US company Badger Sport severed ties with the factory this week. Ng Han Guan/AP

Beijing is accused of interning up to 1 million Uighurs in prison-like detention camps. Here, footage purportedly of a re-education camp in Yingye’er, Xinjiang, taken in August 2018.Bitter Winter/YouTube

In a Wednesday statement on its website, Badger Sport said it will no longer work with Hetian Taida, nor import any products from Xinjiang.

It said the decision was made “out of an abundance of caution and to eliminate any concerns about our supply chain given the controversy around doing business” in Xinjiang.

The company said it “will not ship any product sourced from Hetian Taida currently in our possession,” which it said previously accounted for about 1% of its total annual sales.

China is facing more and more scrutiny over its treatment of the Uighurs. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Universities stocking Badger Sport clothing also removed items from their online and physical stores in light of the AP report.

It appears to be a sign that that businesses are reacting to international pressure and reporting on the crackdown.

US bipartisan lawmakers introduced an act last month urging the White House to consider imposing sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for the Uighur crackdown, as well as banning exports of US technology that could be used to oppress Uighurs.

China’s foreign ministry told the AP that Badger Sport’s decision to cut ties with Hetian Taida was “a tragedy for its business.” It said that AP report on forced labor used “such wrong information.”